What is Workflow? A Hands-on Guide for Beginners

While workflow may sound confusing at first, it’s mostly because this word has a very broad meaning.

This article is about business workflows, it explains how to properly describe them using diagrams and task lists.

I will also give a real world example and a step-by-step guide to workflow automation using software tools.

Sources like Wikipedia will try to explain in a way that will confuse most of us rather than making it easier to understand:

A workflow consists of an orchestrated and repeatable pattern of business activity enabled by the systematic organisation of resources into processes that transform materials, provide services, or process information. It can be depicted as a sequence of operations, the work of a person or group, the work of an organisation of staff, or one or more simple or complex mechanisms.

Before we continue diving deep into workflows and processes, here’s a nice and short definition of a workflow that will help you understand it quickly:

Workflow defines tasks to be performed in a defined order by specific people or a computer.

We can describe most of the repeating business activities as a list of tasks performed in a defined order.

Wonder why do most of the top-performing businesses are using workflows?

Having well-defined business workflows and using workflow software brings a number of important benefits:

1. Improved visibility.

Managers and employees involved in a workflow can instantly see the status of every ongoing process making it completely transparent.

If anything is late or stuck – we can notice it right away and address properly.

2. Eliminated paperwork and paper chasing

Workflow automatically routes all documents, files, and data between tasks and people.

Once a person has finished their part, workflow immediately passes results of their work on to a next step.

3. Fewer emails

When business workflows are clearly defined you will have much less useless emails clogging employees’ inboxes.

Everyone will have clear instructions on what they should do, how, when and in what order.

4. You can scale operations with confidence

Training new employees when business is growing fast is a major challenge.

But when you have your workflows defined and described it becomes an easy task, since new employees have rules to follow and do not need to gather informal wisdom about how to perform their duties.

Moreover, their work is transparent and visible to a team so it is easy to spot and correct any mistakes quick.

5. Automation

With a help of workflow management tools, you can relay some work and decisions previously done by people to workflow. It turns out that you can save a lot of time and significantly improve employees’ productivity by offloading tasks like these from humans to a computer:

Send documents by email for signing.

Save signed documents to a Google Drive.

Add a new appointment to a calendar.

Send a welcome email to new employees.

Request approval by CFO on all purchase requests above $10,000.

Generate a new contract based on client’s data and send for signing.

How to properly describe a workflow?

Before you can actually gain all these benefits, you need to describe workflows and make them easily available to your employees.

You could use a flowchart diagram or a list of tasks to document all steps and their order first.

After that you should add more information to every step:

Instructions on how to perform every step.

Who is responsible for each task (usually referred to as task’s assignee).

From a workflow to a business processes

A simple checklist may be sufficient at the very beginning or for very simple workflows.

But in a real world, you most likely will want to add more information.

You can also specify:

Due dates for every task.

Data and documents that should be provided and used on every step (usually as a form with fields to be filled in on every step).

Data and documents needed to perform every step.

For optional steps only: conditions that should be met.

When you include all these details in your workflows describing some business-related activities – it’s common to refer to these as “business processes” instead of a “workflows”.
The whole approach of managing business operations using business processes is referred to as “Business Process Management” or, in short, “BPM”.

Creating a process in Metatask

With so many details required for every single task, you can imagine how complicated a document describing a real-world workflow with 30 or 50 tasks could be!

Forcing employees to read all these documents, remember them and follow updates is close to impossible.

Fortunately, simple tools designed specifically for describing, managing and automating business workflows and business processes are available.

Let see how we can describe a simple Vacation Approval Process using Metatask.

The process description is named a “template” in Metatask. So we will start by creating a new template named “Request paid vacation”.

We will name the process so that employees who want to use the process can understand what it does:

Now it’s a time to add actual tasks. We will add three tasks:

Manager’s approval

Update vacations calendar

Update available days balance

Next step is to create a form to collect information needed to handle this kind of requests.

We will add a few fields:

Requestor – to record information about employee requesting vacation.

Direct manager – to record information about the manager who needs to give approval.

Start and end dates of a vacation – these should be provided by the requestor.